Tonight I watched the movie A Man Called Ove and it brought into focus the importance of friendship. Ove is a widowed retiree who spends his time enforcing the block association rules he created when he was in charge. After being forced into retirement six months after his wife's death from cancer, Ove decides to die so he can join her. Yet, all his attempts at suicide fail because he is interrupted by someone in need of his help. No matter how rude he is to his new neighbors and the rest of the block people keep coming by to ask him for his help. Parvaneh, his pregnant new neighbor, continues to befriend him and integrate him into her life with her husband and kids. She forces him to open up and we realize that his late wife Sonja was everything to him. Ove says, "Before Sonja there was nothing, and after Sonja there is nothing" and the audience understands how lost he feels without his wife and his reason for continually attempting to commit suicide. The friendship that blossoms between Parvaneh and Ove seems to bring Ove back to life in a way and he helps others and lives the way Sonja would have wanted him to. In a way, Parvaneh's family becomes the family that Ove and Sonja had lost. Parvaneh's kids even call Ove grandpa and it is Parvaneh that worries when she doesn't see Ove's walkway shoveled. She knows Ove wakes early to do rounds to check on the neighborhood and runs over to check on him since she knows something is wrong. She finds that Ove had died in his sleep due to a heart condition in which his heart is too big. This scene was especially ironic due to his temper and attitude to others in the beginning of the movie. The movie made me think about the loved ones that are left behind when someone dies, most people don't know how to comfort those in grief or act around them after their loss. The movie highlighted the fact that no one can go it alone and people need to rely on each other. After watching A Man Called Ove you'll want to hug your loved ones and strengthen your friendships.
One thing that stood out to me from the talk given by Ms. Suzanna Fritzberg was her discussion of working in the male-dominated field of politics. She said that the saying "male-dominated" is another way of saying it is a "male-supreme" field, where males are seen as better than everyone else. She recounted how she challenges the stereotypes of women in the office by dissociating herself with anything secretarial. She wears slacks instead of skirts, doesn't dress down, never volunteers to take notes during a meeting, doesn't make coffee and learned to talk fast in order to get her ideas across before someone has a chance to interrupt her. She also said to never apologize for taking up space. This stuck with me since the field that I plan to enter can be considered a male-dominated as well. It made me realize that I needed to figure out my own worth and respect myself before I could expect anyone else to treat me that way I deserve. It also made me think abou...
Using the tool the Autobiographical "I" from Smith & Watson's toolkit helped me understand why certain kinds of language is used with Maya Angelou's memoir. When I consider the time in which she was writing this and how she would want to be historically accurate about her experiences. When I consider the "gap between the narrating "I" and the narrator" I realize that she writes as if she was going through the experiences all over again. Instead of recalling these experiences and discussing them from the view of an adult she describes her thoughts as a child going through this for the first time. This makes the memoir more poignant as the readers are brought along and experiencing this with her and understand her thoughts. For example, when she is discussing her rape, the word "rape" is never said, since as a child she didn't understand what had happened to her. In this way she only discusses what she felt as a child and does not h...
When reading The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, I noticed something interesting in the way she wrote. Persepolis was written as a graphic novel and is dedicated to Marjane's parents. Yet the book is written to an audience that is not familiar in Iranian culture and history. This is evident by the two "voices" throughout the book, the narrator speaking at the top of each episode is the adult Marjane explaining or providing insight. Whereas, the narrator speaking in the bubble of each box is the young Marjane going through these experiences. The adult Marjane continually has to provide insight into her culture or background on certain topics to the audience reading the book. Yet, one would think since the dedication is to her parents that she expects people familiar with her culture and history to be reading the book. In fact, its the complete opposite, since the book is banned in Iran the majority of its readers will have little to no information on Iranian hi...
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